


so many somethings

by handfulofstardust



Category: Superman - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - You've Got Mail Fusion, F/M, WIP
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-04-04
Updated: 2018-04-04
Packaged: 2019-04-18 09:47:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14210454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handfulofstardust/pseuds/handfulofstardust
Summary: you've got mail, but w/ lois & clark.inspired by the smallville versions of the chars + the gwenda bonds + some truly wonderful fic that exists right here on this website! some disclaimers: i have no idea what i'm doing, how journalism works, how to write characters or plot or anything at all, and i'm just in this for the fun, so be kind





	so many somethings

**Author's Note:**

> this is a wip which means i am posting 1 chapter as a challenge to myself to actually finish writing this lol so comments and kudos would be VERY MUCH appreciated, thanks

She unlocks the front door as quietly as she can, but everything seems unbearably loud in 1am silence. She takes off her shoes at the door and picks them up, holds her keys tightly in her other hand so they don’t jangle, and tiptoes past the door at the beginning of the corridor that hangs slightly ajar. Only when she reaches the end of the corridor, climbs the stairs, enters the room at the top, and closes the door, does she allow herself to breathe.

She drops her shoes and heads towards the fridge. The thing with working late is that she’s always ravenous, but luckily there’s leftover Chinese food and some ice cream in the freezer. She considers zapping the food in the microwave, but decides against it, and settles down on the windowsill with cold noodles and her laptop.

Her apartment isn’t much – it isn’t even really an apartment, just a bedroom and an ensuite and a kind of living-room-kitchen-thing on the second floor of a really old house, rented out to her as an independent floor. The landlady, who insists on being called Miss Ivernay and nothing else, lives on the ground floor, permanently smells of peppermint tea, and sleeps at 8pm sharp, which makes Lois’ odd hours difficult to navigate. She’s almost 100% sure, in fact, that good ol’ Iverney hates her guts, but is too passive-aggressive – and too fond of her monthly rent – to kick her out. For her part, Lois likes to think she’s a good tenant: she tries her best to be as quiet as possible while entering the house at ungodly hours of the morning, she pays her rent on time (mostly), and she only _very_ rarely lets stray cats in through the window.

One of them, a grey stray christened Piglet, squeezes himself in through the open window and settles down at Lois’ feet. She absent-mindedly scratches his head as she opens her laptop. She’s tired today – job well done, but she’s still jittery. She and Jimmy had managed to get an exclusive scoop on a drug bust that she’d spent ages working on recon for, and she’s still keyed up with those weeks of energy. She’d typed up the article finally ten minutes before deadline – and submitted it a half hour late anyway, after she’d combed through spelling errors. White had let her off with a gruff “good job,” though, which was basically a medal of honour.

She looks out the window as her laptop boots up. The Metropolis skyline is stunning at all times of the day, but night is her favourite: streaks of headlights on the road, lights in buildings on here and there, those few souls as awake as she is. In the distance, she can see the Daily Planet globe, located right on top of the tall building. She can’t see the stars, but she remembered reading somewhere that cities were like stars on earth, glittery shining lights on the ground.

Her laptop gives a familiar _ping_ and she opens the email account she’s been using for months now – not her work one, not the one that she set up when she was twelve (nancydrewzzz17@gmail.com), but her secret one, the one that she’s shared with only one person. The person who just sent her a new email.

She opens it and the message fills the screen. It starts:

 

> From: farmb0y  
>  To: tripleaces
> 
> You won’t believe this, but here’s today’s Shelby update – she ate some of the (sugared) oats we set aside for the horses, and now she’s so hyped up that she won’t sit still. Me and Ma took her to the vet, but he just laughed at us, so now we have seventy pounds of golden retriever running around our house nonstop. She didn’t have a great sense of direction to begin with, but now we have lovely streaks all down our nice blue walls where she didn’t manage to stop herself from collision.
> 
> I saw a patch of flowers near the road today. A car drove past it, splashed a puddle of water on it, but they stood firm, all pink and yellow and straight-stemmed and bright. I wish I knew what kind they were. Summer’s just around the corner.  

Lois reads the rest quickly. She smiles softly and clicks reply.

 

> From: tripleaces  
>  To: farmb0y
> 
> i love shelby. i’ve never met her, but i love her. i, too, love sugared oats and have a terrible sense of direction. we’d get along greatttt.
> 
> work _has_ cleared up but it never really clears up, if you know what i mean – and honestly i wouldn’t have it any other way. i can’t even imagine not working, not having the job i do. i know – no specifics! so as vaguely as possible: it’s demanding, it’s neverending, but it’s definitely making some kind of impact. aaand thats what i loev about it!
> 
> summer in the city is probably a lot different from summer where you are. the only bright flowers i see are in the park i walk past on the way to work, and in the florists’ down my road. she always has the loveliest flower arrangements, and i always have half a mind to buy them, but metropolis prices are ridiculous (or is that florist prices everywhere?). anyway, if i had to choose, i’d buy daisies. just daisies. fill up my entire room with daisies.

When she’s done typing up a reply, she shuts her laptop and picks a startled half-asleep Piglet up from the windowsill. He’ll sleep in with her in her bedroom, but she leaves the window open so he can come and go as he pleases. Her last thought before falling asleep is this: the best thing about emailing farmb0y is that she can finally switch off her goddamn spellcheck.

*

How did this start?

Like most things: accidentally. She’d been hanging around message boards for (would you believe) alien sightings and theories, trying out a new angle on an early piece of hers about conspiracy theorists. Except who she run into was entirely unexpected. She’d come across farmb0y, who seemed to be firmly advocating the lizard people theory, until she realised that most of his posts actually contained Simon & Garfunkel lyrics – “watch out for the patterns. like a rat in a maze, the path before us lies, and the lizard people are the ones behind the maze.” She’d private-messaged him, he’d admitted his interest on the website was pure curiosity and that he was a huge S&G fan, and they’d kind of… never stopped messaging after that. Lois published her article, they exchanged email IDs, the site went defunct, and they kept in contact. Sporadically: they reply when they can, which means sometimes strings of emails in a day and sometimes radio silence for a week.

It's a weird setup. Even in an age of internet unprivacy, all she knew of farmb0y was what he chose to tell her, and whatever information she could glean from his limited message board profile – that he’s the same age as her, male, lives in Kansas. And honestly, in an age of internet unreliability, she can’t really trust any of that…

…but she trusts him anyway. Her job, her literal job, is to find out _facts_ , the cold hard truth, to investigate, and it wouldn’t take too much digging to trace him down – but emailing farmb0y is not work. It’s what gets her through some days. He is a stranger – he might not even _be_ a he – but he feels so familiar to her, as if they’d been friends all their lives.

*

The newsroom is abuzz the next day with the success of yesterday’s story, and there’s a pile of replies on Lois’ desk from concerned citizens, ranging from thank-yous to you-put-my-husband-in-jail-i-hate-yous. She decides that sorting through them is a job for another day, and sets her coffee carefully near her work computer.

Somewhere beneath the mess that lies atop her desk is a neat little nameplate with her name on it: _Lois Lane_. She remembers the first day she got it, when she upgraded from unpaid intern to paid intern to regular journalist. Not much has changed since those days, really, Lois thinks, because even fresh out of college she’d come at the job with the same directness and focus and single-mindedness she does now. Rules be damned (deadlines be damned, too) if it means getting to the heart of the story. It isn’t always easy (and god knows White, her boss, finds her hell to deal with), but it gets the job done, the story out, and when the story’s out, Lois is alright. It feels good. Some kind of catharsis.

She’s sipping her coffee and looking through a couple of the notes on top for kicks – _reveal your source or else_ – when White walks up to her and taps on her desk. This is surprising enough – usually she gets a sharp “office, Lane,” barked at her, and she reports dutifully at his big glass-walled room – and it’s only more so when she notices that he’s not alone. With him is a tall, bespectacled man. Admittedly, everyone is tall to Lois, who only scrapes five feet three in heels, but this man is just _impressively_ so, towering over even White. He has a nice face, sort of soft, Lois notices, and he blinks a lot beneath his dark-rimmed glasses and swish of unruly dark hair.

“Lane, this is Kent.” White says by way of introduction.

Lois extends her hand to shake Kent’s, who has a firm grip and a way of looking at her directly in the eye, but only for a second, as if he’s shy, which is just ridiculously endearing and wholly unexpected for a man that tall. (Not that height has anything to do with anything, but Lois can’t help but think it.)

“He’s our newest recruit, set up next to Jimmy.” White points at the desk directly opposite Lois’, where photographer Jimmy Olsen has been desk-partnerless for over a year now. “Kent, if you need anything, ask Lane. Lane, if he needs anything, you’re in charge. Where the copy machine is. Where to get the coffee.”

“Burton’s Café down the road, if you want the good kind,” Lois quips, then laughs as White turns his glare at her. “Right, right, coffee machine down the hall. I’ll be helpful.”

“You’d better. And where’s that piece on the art gallery I asked you to cover?”

“Done and dusted and in your inbox, right on time, chief,” Lois says cheerfully, because she’d actually managed to turn that in by the deadline before the big scoop yesterday.

White looks at her warily, but concedes: “Alright, Lane.” He heads off towards his office, calling back over his shoulder just before the door closes behind him – “and don’t call me chief!”

Kent looks slightly overwhelmed by the noise of the newsroom, or maybe just White’s general vibe, and Lois has to laugh – he looks less like deer, more like puppy in the headlights. “I’m Lois,” she says, effectively reintroducing herself. “White isn’t particularly fond of first names, but that’s probably just because he can’t stand ever being referred to as Perry.”

Kent smiles at her. “Can’t imagine why. I’m Clark.”

“Well, Clark,” says Lois, “welcome to the Planet.”

*

After three days of working with Clark Kent, Lois thinks maybe she’ll kill him.

White thought it’d be a _great_ idea for Kent to tag along on a couple of her interviews, learn the ropes, see how a “real reporter does things” (thinking back, he’d really played her – flattery always worked on her, and he knew it). And she’d gone along with it, because, hey, what wrong could taking an eight foot tall new reporter on her rounds really do?

A lot, apparently.

First. At an interview with an engineer at a rig that had had a gas leak, he’d managed to accidentally offend not just the engineer, but his entirely family, _entirely by accident_ – and had apologized about seventy times for it. It was a genuine mistake, and the kind of interview misstep that Lois had to admit she’d only learned to avoid well into her journalism career, and Kent had looked so thoroughly mortified that she’d let it slide.

Second. At a meeting with a woman whose daughter had returned home after seven years missing, he actually _interrupted_ Lois’ interview to ask _his own question_. It was a good question, but still. Lois felt her territory being invaded by a goddamn _rookie_.

Third, just now, the height of Lois’ murderous rage. At a super-important, very hard-to-get interview with a representative of LutherCorp, outside of a press conference, one of the most difficult meetings Lois had managed to get together (and not without a little hard flirting), he’d managed to _wander off_ and was brought back by two beefy men in black suits and sunglasses, and they’d been politely chucked out of the building mid-interview.

“Well done,” Lois huffs as they head back to the Planet. “Expertly done. You’re like a freaking _kid_ at a _toy store_ , and I gotta keep an eye on you all the time.” She groaned. “And now we’re going back _empty-handed_. Oh, the humiliation!” She was being extra dramatic, but all that energy needed to go somewhere if it couldn’t go into severing Kent’s stupidly good-looking featherbrained head off the rest of his body.

“Not quite empty-handed,” Kent grinned, and to Lois’ absolute shock, surprise, awe, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out… a piece of paper. Which he proceeds to toss in her direction.

“Where… did you get this,” Lois breathes, because this is a piece of paper from Luthor’s personal desk. As in, _Lex Luthor_ , as in, famously impenetrable reclusive multibillionaire, second only to Gotham’s own rich kid, Bruce Wayne. A piece of paper that happens to have a part of Luthor’s schedule neatly printed on it. A _key_ to the goddamn _palace_.

Kent shrugs, hands in his pockets, grinning like perhaps going for a smug look but actually ending up looking more surprised at his own efforts than anything else.

“Who _are_ you, Clark Kent,” Lois laughs, and she could run up and hug him but she’s still got some murder-y feelings left and doesn’t want to risk it, “and where the _fuck_ did you come from?”

 


End file.
